The “obese” baby item adds insult to injury in its complete lack of knowledge about healthy children and breastfeeding. The whole point of breastfeeding is that the baby takes as much nourishment as he or she needs/wants, and uses it in the body’s best interest. And ever since my mother’s day and before, these powerful moneymaking forces have been trying to convince mothers–successfully, I might add– that their own breast milk is insufficient to the task of feeding their babies what they need to grow. Then once the science started going, um, well, actually it turns out we left an awful lot out of those baby formulas and breast milk really is better, there was this huge surge of “but it’s the mother’s choice, we really can’t say that one is better than the other, so you lactivists better stop making women feel bad for not choosing breastfeeding over formula.” –and to a point I can see that; it’s absolutely wrong to make the women feel bad for not choosing to take the harder road and buck the system, fight for adequate time and space to breastfeed at work, refuse to be shamed by people (including family members) who give her that “eew, public breastfeeding!” look or worse, and in short take on a world that tells us breast is best but makes it incredibly difficult for many women to do what they know they really want to do for their babies.

(Rant over. More or less. I am passionate about many things green and sustainable, and breastfeeding is one of them. Normally I don’t rant about it myself, I let people like The Feminist Breeder and PhD in Parenting do it for me, because they are much better and more coherent. Both of these women, by the way, along with many others, do more than rant–they are writing letters, asking the hard questions, making demands, and actually changing things…they are so out of my league it’s not even funny, and I salute them.)

This is insane. It’s as though the insurance companies have abandoned all pretense at trying to help people get health care and now are openly and overtly saying “We’ll only grant you the privilege of paying us lots of money for a policy if we’re fairly sure we’ll never have to give you back a cent; and if it ever does look like we might have to do that, we’ll find a way to ensure that there’s some way we can wiggle out of it.”